Opinion: Just another day at school

It’s fair to say that it was just an average school day — at least in this country. Children scooted into Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, for the last week of classes before the Christmas holiday. The lunch menu promised chicken sandwiches and sour cream and chive fries. Kids were in study hall. And then, a 15-year old girl opened fire. She killed a fellow student and a teacher and wounded six others.

Parent fielded emotional text messages from their children in the midst of the trauma. The police chief provided a timeline of actions taken by first responders and noted that police officers entered the school within three minutes of their arrival. There was talk of reunification areas, counselors and heroes who helped stanch the bleeding of victims.

In the United States, all of this is normal — from the mundane to the mayhem. The statistics make that clear.

There have been 29 mass killings with guns in 2024. This is normal because, as of Monday evening, it was the 323rd shooting at a school this year, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database, which aims to document each incident of a gun being fired on school grounds or bullets traversing them. This is normal because more than 390,000 students have experienced gun violence while in school since the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999. This is normal for big public schools and small private ones. It’s normal for schools in high tax bracket neighborhoods and those in working-class ones. It’s what happens in secular classrooms and religious ones.

Sometimes, when these shootings happen, they’re overshadowed by other, more catastrophic news of the day. On other occasions, there’s simply a terrible sameness to the story — another day, another parent’s heart is broken. The dead blur into the monumental public tapestry of sorrows. But sometimes, there are details that leave a mark. In Sandy Hook, it was the age of the tiny elementary school victims. In Uvalde, it was the stories of children playing dead so they didn’t draw the attention of a shooter in search of more victims. It was the tenacity and bravery of children in the face of law enforcement that dawdled and deflected. In Parkland, it was the sheer anger and outrage that roiled the student body in the aftermath and sparked the March for Our Lives protest. In Madison, it was the flat-toned anger of a police chief and the story of the 911 phone call by a second-grade teacher.

Every legislator who refuses to act on gun control, every entrepreneur who tries to come up with new ways to get more weapons on the street, every gun owner who leans on the Second Amendment as a license to be reckless, should consider what it means for someone charged with the care of a group of 7- and 8-year-olds to call for aid in the midst of a shooting. Even more, imagine being the operator listening to that plea for help. Or the police officer racing to that scene. Or the medic. Or the funeral home director. It’s not necessary to be a parent to feel the tragedy.

Today’s schoolchildren need help staying alive. And yet in some corners of the country, a greater fear seems to be of drag queens reading “Worm Loves Worm” to kids at the neighborhood book store, with an aim toward entertainment and a lesson in tolerance. People are fretting over which bathroom a transgender child can use when entire schools are practicing lockdown procedures for when — not if — their entire student body finds itself under siege.

Abundant Life is a small faith-based school with about 400 students spread over grades kindergarten to 12. The curriculum is Bible-centered. These students and faculty are well aware of the power of prayer. And while many folks have chimed in that they are praying for the families that are suffering, other people of faith might reasonably wonder why the citizens of this country are not using the good sense that the Lord gave them to actually do something about the violence.

Instead, schools have lockdown drills. Legislators want to transform schools into hard targets with sophisticated metal detectors and on-site police officers. Schools have banned backpacks or required students to carry belongings in clear plastic bags. Schools have teachers and security guards eyeballing students for signs of suspicious behavior. All of which turns entering a schoolhouse into the equivalent of a trudge through airport security at best and a day trip to a minimum-security prison at worst.

Is this really what it means to keep children safe? Abundant Life did not have metal detectors. It didn’t have police officers patrolling the hallways. That’s not a lapse. It is, perhaps, a naive belief that there’s a difference between a safe space and a bunker.

In the aftermath of the shooting at Abundant Life, law enforcement is working to determine a motive. “Why” is certainly a mystery worth solving, but the more pressing question is “how?” How did a 15-year-old access a loaded gun? How did we become so accustomed to school shootings that there is now a first-responder protocol for them? How did violence against children become almost an inevitability?

Several since Monday have described the Abundant Life school community as “close-knit” or the equivalent. They always do. It’s easy to believe that if people surround themselves with those who look like them or think like them or share the same values, that there’s safety in that sameness.

But the only thing that has become certain in this country is that even in close-knit communities of like-minded parents where second-grade teachers follow prescribed protocols to keep children safe, shootings will happen. They will happen until the guns are under control. Going to school will no longer be an act of faith. And an average day will mean that every kid in this country comes home from school alive.

Robin Givhan is senior critic-at-large at The Washington Post writing about politics, race and the arts. A 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism, Givhan has also worked at Newsweek/Daily Beast, Vogue magazine and the Detroit Free Press.

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